ANC26FA054 · Air Tractor Inc AT-502B
Kurtz Aviation Air Tractor Inc AT-502B · Accident
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC26FA054
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Ongoing
- API-reported fatalities
- 1 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Air Tractor Inc AT-502B
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-502
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N503GK
- Operator
- Kurtz Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 12 years (built 2014)
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 137: Agricultural
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Unknown
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Unknown or undetermined
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On June 15, 2026, about 2015 Central daylight time, an Air Tractor AT-502B airplane, N503GK, sustained substantial damage when it was involved in an accident near Forbes, Missouri. The pilot was fatally injured. The airplane was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 137 Agricultural flight. According to the operator, the airplane was working off a remote grass airstrip 15 miles northwest of Rosecrans Airport (KSTJ) starting at 1730. The purpose of the flight was to apply urea and ammonia sulfate to a corn field. The pilot was working 5 miles southeast of the grass airstrip. There were two company airplanes working in the area. Each airplane was equipped with a Mode C transponder and automatic dependent surveillance- broadcast (ADS-B). They maintained two-way communication between the two airplanes and the ground crew. There was no distress calls made on the radio or any indication of a mechanical problem with the accident airplane, and there were no witnesses to the accident. The airplane wreckage was subsequently found nose down, in an area of tree-covered terrain, resulting in substantial damage to the wings, fuselage and empennage. A detailed wreckage examination is pending.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC26FA054
- Event ID
- 20260616203188
- Case number
- ANC26FA054
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2026-06-16.
- API snapshot SHA-256: be2bd16e18e06c45c35ed2dca35fa6f0fd132b3a3ab24823ad56b0b86b4fbada; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:16:55.004Z.